Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

there's so many ways in which kudos have been polluted for me by the algorithmic problems of facebook, twitter, youtube et al: popularity that makes things appear earlier in a search result, things that other people have liked appearing in a timeline, and yes, the visual indicator of virality.

But all of those interfaces specifically don't have the IMO sensible sorting of DW and AO3: give people what they ask for, in first chronological order, unless (on the AO3) they ask for a different ordering. And they don't have traditional relevance ranking, either. They specifically have an algorithm that rewards virality, which rewards gaming the system and outrageous content, while punishing thoughtful or slow or content-rich posts. And we don't do that, so a kudos button should be no more problematic than it is on the AO3.

But the last several years have made me so gunshy about anything which creates a twitter/YouTube/Facebook style reward system that I can't want the feature. I recognize that that's not fully rational, which is why, I guess, I feel less strongly about that than I do about reblogging. It still has the anti-pattern of maladaptive rewards, but it's probably not a problem if implemented well. And allowing people to turn off notifications, and hiding how many there are, and definitely not changing the algorithms, are certainly ways to contribute to people having the interactive mode that they want without it being nearly as problematic.